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Re:Interview with Scott Aaronson by elcapitan on Saturday April 23, 2016 @10:43AM (#11555707)
How does meta-analysis in a highly opinion based field like the social sciences, where there are different, mutually exclusive schools of thought even make sense in the first place?
Re:Interview with Scott Aaronson by pron on Saturday April 23, 2016 @10:55AM (#11555783)
And how does a lack of even rudimentary knowledge of a specific field of study qualify one to reject it wholesale?

The difficulties in meta-analysis in the social sciences vary from field to field -- psychology is qualitatively different from anthropology or history -- but if we had to generalize, they have more to do with the sheer dimensionality of the problem combined with the difficulty of precise measurement (and sometimes obtaining a large-enough sample), than with the field being "opinion based" or the existence of "mutually exclusive schools of thought" (I don't know how this differs from many other, more tractable research areas, and I don't see how this can be reconciled with saying that there's too much consensus).

Re:Interview with Scott Aaronson by mafribe on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:04PM (#11556345)
I'd say that scientific fields being "opinion based" or forming around "mutually exclusive schools of thought" is a reaction to "the sheer dimensionality of the problem combined with the difficulty of precise measurement".

You see similar social phenomena in other fields with a measurement problem, for example programming language research ...

Re:Interview with Scott Aaronson by pron on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:49PM (#11556546)
> You see similar social phenomena in other fields with a measurement problem, for example programming language research ...

Touché! :) (although there's plenty of social science research that is much more empirically rigorous than PL research, and the certainty/evidence ratio is certainly higher in PL)